For the past two months in the calendars of us Thespians Anonymous, we have seen some really intense rehearsing, and a couple of hard-worked but fun prop-making workshops. We showed you before how we made swords among other things, how about we have a look at how to make helmets this time?
These are going to be made from papier-mâiché, so we first need to prepare the paper strips. The best and cheapest material is newspaper.
It takes A LOT of paper. (But at least we found out that tearing paper strips is actually very therapeutic!)
The base for the helmets is cut out from thin cardboard, like cereal boxes. It then needs to be fitted for the head.
These balloons aren’t for a party - at least not yet! They need to be roughly the size of the actors’ skulls, for they will go inside the helmets, instead of actual human heads, when we are putting on the paper strips...… like this. The liquid is a mixture of white glue and water (somewhere between ¼ water-¾ glue and ⅓ water-⅔ glue). The strips are first soaked in the mixture and then laid on the “skeleton” of the helmet.
More and more, until it is completely covered, and then we let it dry. It will harden and finally look like this:
It still needs painting, but maybe you’ll come to the show to see how they look by then? 😉 (Thank you Jonathan for modeling!)
Some other things we included…
…like our awesome lightning bolts (unfortunately our budget was not enough to make them out of real lightning, but believe me you won’t tell the difference!)
… a Medusa head (I told her NOT to look in the eyes!)
… and the “wind born egg” that was the beginning of all!
Thespians Anonymous are proud to present their spring production of 2014: The Iliad, The Odyssey, and All of Greek Mythology, in 99 Minutes or Less! The shows will be on May 7th, 8th, 13th and 15th at 7:00 P.M., in Kulttuuriareena Gloria, Pieni Roobertinkatu 12. More info on our webpage or on our Facebook event page.
